Na it's not really true, you don't rent it (the name), you pay for the administrative work, you still ~have the namerights, like google.com...they own that name, because they are the "creator" of it.

They're not the creator, Verisign created it. And I don't know about Google's specific agreement (they may have paid decades in advance for all we know) but in general if a company forgets to pay they lose their name, there were a few high profile cases like that already. That isn't ownership, that's rent.

>They're not the creator, Verisign created it.

They registered it, NOT created/invented it. It's like saying the Patent-office created your patent, but yeah you can loose the url, like you can loose your patent when you forgot to pay the patent-office.

Renting is just not the right word, because renting means that you never owned it, but someone else.

Sure but don't pay your property tax and let me know what happens there.

Government will sue you and if courts find you owing money to the government and you fail to pay up, some of your property will be seized and sold off to cover the due tax and legal fees.

That "some" might not be the property you failed to pay the tax on (eg it could be your car whereas you failed to pay property taxes on your house). There are usually protections on the property you inhabit, but otherwise they should look to seize whatever is smallest but big enough to cover the amount due.

With domains, you lose the domain that you failed to pay fees on, and no other property will be seized to pay it off.

The difference is in requiring a court system and in what way you are liable (any of your holdings can cover it).

Yes, that's a good analogy, it's pretty much the exact same situation, with the only difference that the government collects tax while DNS is in the hands of private corporations.

Imo there is a good argument for property tax if you view land as a somewhat public good. After all some wealthy family can and in some cases in the old world literally does own vast stretches of land for centuries. That's basically hereditary aristocracy, probably not the best political system we could come up with. So imposing a tax/rent on land ownership seems reasonable to me.

Anyway, I may be digressing because the point wasn't even if it's good or bad, just that it isn't ownership in the way people generally understand the term. With DNS I find it personally questionable why it's in private hands if we as a society have decided to impose a tax/rent. It used to be public afaik, it's a bit like privatizing the water supply. I think most people would be against it if they know how the internet works. They simply never noticed it even happened.

>DNS is in the hands of private corporations

https://www.icann.org/ ??

> you pay for the administrative work

If you were truly buying a domain name, the administrative work would be one-time, indeed one might think the entire overhead of maintaining a registry would be significantly less.

Domain names were historically much cheaper and the price for acquiring one was effectively administrative fees before domain names became a highly profitable and competitive market. Some domains are still free, whether 3rd/4th level domain from eu.org, or 2nd level domain from public-service TLDs like .ml (Mali) or .ga (Gabon).

It's a shame we have to pay at all for what is essentially a text entry in a database. I'm not opposed to having commercial domains (.com) or private TLDs paying off infrastructure for all other users, but i believe it's an essential component to a free Internet that anybody can own many names for free. Many projects would have died before birth if not for friendly operators giving away names or a shell account and some storage space on a server.

Economic barriers kill innovation, especially from poorer countries where 10$/y is not cheap, or for people for whom access to banking services is not easy/guaranteed (such as homeless or indebted folks in western countries).